


tell them the wolves have come again

by Junkyard_Rose



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: About That Stab Wound, Gen, in true grrm fashion she eats and sleeps a lot and goes on a slightly deadly roadtrip, the logistics of arya returning to westeros, wolves are vaguely menacing in the distance, yikes @ westerosi medicine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-03
Updated: 2017-08-03
Packaged: 2018-12-10 14:50:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11693955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Junkyard_Rose/pseuds/Junkyard_Rose
Summary: Arya Stark goes home.





	tell them the wolves have come again

**Author's Note:**

> -showverse is bullshit but I wanted the logistics of how tf Arya got from ‘stabbed a fuckton in braavos’ to flexing her culinary skills at the twins so here’s this. Set between 6.08 and 6.10  
> -show age, which is fourteen (ish?) by my count, but with book references thrown in for *jazz hands*

 

Arya spends the journey across the narrow sea holed up in her cabin wracked with fever. Her wounds fester before she’s two days out of port, turning red and swollen and oozing pus. The ship’s boy helps her soak strips of linen in boiled wine and wrap her side with them. He’s a few years younger than her and he blushes whenever she pushes her tunic up to dress the Waif’s parting gift.

She’d paid a medicine woman to stich it closed before she boarded the ship, but the catgut stitches rip open when she’s in the depth of a fever dream, thrashing and sobbing in her sleep. She wakes up in the morning to find the stained bedding beneath her turned a dark, frightening red, and for a moment she thinks she’s flowered. She had to get the ship’s boy help her stitch the wound closed again; her fingers are too weak to hold the needle steady, and she was always shit at sewing anyway.

“You were crying out for your mother last night,” the ship’s boy told her after. His name was Jon, but she could hardly bear to think it, let alone say it. Arya only remembered her fever dreams in fragments and flashes. She’d dreamed of her father first, the rotted flesh sloughing off his bones, and after him Robb with his terrible wolf’s head, Jon lying dead in the snow, Sansa screaming and screaming as their dead were paraded before them.

Arya’s favourite brother had been stabbed so many times the snowy grounds of Castle Black turned red with it, the Westerosi sailors claimed. They’d been laughing about it on the first day out of port, but they’d shut up when they saw her listening. “’Tis too terrible a thing for the ears of a girl,” the captain had chastised them. Arya made the ship’s boy tell her over a meagre meal of broth and hard bread.

“They’s talking about the Night’s Watch,” he told her obliviously, “what went and stabbed their Lord Commander. Snow, he was called.” Jon-the-ship’s-boy went back to his broth, and Arya sat as calm as still water with her heart breaking inside her chest. That night her first fever dream had fallen upon her and when she’d woken, panting and terrified, she felt the Waif’s gift throbbing something fierce. In the morning, blood and yellow pus had soaked through her bandages and the shirt both. By the third day, she was too sick to get out of her bunk.

The ship’s boy brought her meals and emptied her chamber pot. He reminded her a little of Hot Pie, cheerful and round, but not half so craven as her old friend had been. He sat by her bed while she was sick and told her stories about dragons and sea monsters. For a while she thought she would die, lying there listening to him, the ship rocking steadily underneath them. When one of the oarsmen yelled for him, the boy had to scurry off or else face a beating, and then Arya lay there and thought she would die alone.

She did cry out for her mother, and for her father and her brothers too. She cried for Sansa, sobbing out nonsensical apologies. For a while she thought her sister was with her, standing over her bunk, wearing the fine gown Arya had once stained with a blood orange. “I’m sorry,” Arya told her, “I love you, I’m sorry,” but Sansa melted away into Lady Crane, bloody and beautiful in death. “The many-faced god must have his due,” she told Arya sadly, and Arya saw that she was holding Needle’s hilt and the blade was plunged deep into Arya’s throat. When she tried to scream, blood came gurgling up out of her mouth. “A fine little blade,” Polliver told her, laughing.

Her throat was dry and painful when she drifted back into consciousness. “She’s dying,” someone said, as if from very far away. “She is _not_ ,” argued a boy’s voice, and a small hand held a cup to her lips. She drank deeply, greedily, and the wine was half gone before the realised it was not water. Her side throbbed and she only had enough time to wonder vaguely what being burned was truly like before she passed out again.

On the sixth day, the dreams faded away long enough for her to sit up in her bunk and drink a canteen of water. The ship’s boy brought her a heel of bread and piece of salted fish. It hurt her teeth to chew, but the small pain was a welcome distraction. By the seventh she could walk a lap around the deck, if she gripped tightly onto the rails and went slow, and by the tenth the pain was nearly gone and she could practise her water dance in a private corner of the deck.

On the eleventh say they sailed into the Bay of Crabs. Arya stood on deck, shivering a little, gazing in awe at the distant white banks to the north. _Snow,_ she thought dizzily, and almost smiled.

Twelve days after sailing out of Braavos, they dropped anchor in Saltpans. She waved farewell to the ship’s boy and joined the landing party, stroking Needle’s hilt with her thumb as they rowed ashore. Saltpans looked different than she remembered; sacked and burned, the fisherfolk had fled for safer harbours, and so many of the townspeople had died. Finding an inn with its doors open proved impossible; all she found was a decrepit tavern manned by a stooped one-armed old man who glared suspiciously at her and bit the coin she paid him with.

“There’s rooms upstairs,” he told her begrudgingly, “where the whores made business, but they’re dead now, dead or run, so long as you don’t mind dirty sheets you’re welcome to ‘em.” Arya had slept on worse than dirty sheets; the old straw-stuff mattress might as well have been a featherbed compared to the mud and rocks that she had once slept upon. For a copper the barkeep served oats, skewers of unidentifiable meat – rat, Arya thought, but she wasn’t quite sure – and jugs of thick dark ale. She went to sleep with hot foot in her belly, and dreamed of wolves.

Her small grey cousins had multiplied in number since last she ran with them, before the fever had stolen her girl-strength. Hungary and vicious they were, and bolder than ever. They ran through the falling snow sleek and quick as arrows, and when they found their mark, they hit hard. Their prey wore blue-grey insignia on their breasts. The night wolf did not care what her meals wore, but the girl did, and the girl saw the twin towers of Frey and hated.

Arya awoke with the taste of blood in her throat and howling ringing in her ears. Her own clothes were soiled with travel, but the whore who had once occupied her rooms had left behind a trunk of clothes, and within it Arya found a tunic that was only a little too big and a worn cloak. She dressed in the predawn light, brushing her fingers lightly against the red scar tissue on her side. _Every hurt is a lesson,_ Syrio had told her once, _and every lesson makes you better._

She brought a horse for more than it was worth off a sour-faced woman, and brought a sack of bread off a baker, and a parcel of dried meat from the butcher. Skinny, bruised children watched her with big mistrustful eyes as she mounted her horse. She threw them a handful of coppers, but they did not dare to move to grab it until she backed away.

Arya knew better than to follow the road, instead guiding her mare through trees and shrubbery, keeping the rising sun to her left as she plodded north. The Twins, at least, were easy to find. All she had to do was follow the Green Fork. She slept under the stars the first night, and the second, but on the third the howling came so close to her camp that the horse panicked and tried to bolt. The wolves drove them to an abandoned village nestled within a glade, empty but for a young woman dying slow of childbed fever.

 “He left,” she told Arya when she found her, wrapped in blankets in front of an empty hearth. “My husband. The babe died and he left. ‘Can’t feed another mouth,’ he says.” Her dark hair was wet with grease and sweat and her green eyes burned bright with the fever. “It’s funny. I thought it was cold, but now I can’t feel it. Are you the Stranger? Have you come for me?”

“I’m Arya Stark.” She sat down on the dirt floor with her, and took the girls hand. She was pretty, Arya saw, pretty and doomed. “I’m a wolf.”

The dying girl barked a laugh that faded into a weak cough. “Oh, I been hearing them howling. I was waitin’ for them to find me. Waitin’ and waitin’.” Her eyes focused on Arya’s face, and slid down to Needle. “Are your claws sharp, wolf girl? I’m so tired. I want to see my babe.”

Arya gave her the gift, as gently as she knew how. She took the girl’s face afterwards, and dug her a grave out in the glade. Her cottage yielded stores of barley and there were stubborn vegetables growing in her garden. Arya listened to the howling of wolves as she made her cookfire in the dead girl’s kitchen, and after she had eaten she let herself become one. It was different this time, she knew. She was not asleep. She was not dreaming. She ran on four strong legs with her cousins whipping through the trees behind her.

The next day a pack of them came upon her when she was fetching water from a stream, yellow eyed and ragged. “Hello, cousins,” Arya told them, unafraid, and then she was looking at herself through the eyes of the alpha. She saw that she had grown, not just taller, but wider in the hips and chest. She saw that her shaved hair was growing in wild and dark, and she saw that her grey eyes had become still white pools, and she saw that she was beautiful.

When she wolves turned tail and ran, it was only because she allowed them to, and they did not approach her again. They still howled in the distance at night, but it did not bother her, not as she rode up the Green Fork towards the Twins, not as she rode towards her justice. 

 


End file.
